Summarizer

The big mistake was underestimating the appetite for rebellion despite 70%-80% wholesale opposition to the regime.[0] I personally know many, many Iranians who welcome the attacks along with their families. All of the high-profile assassinations involve intelligence from Iranians. However, no one has guns, and government-backed militias roam the streets to maintain order.[1] There is no possibility of military coup. Many officers lives and livelihoods are at stake post-revolution, and they will go to great lengths to protect it. Remember, they killed 30K of their own to quell an uprising.[2] Surveillance is everywhere online and in person.[3] One spy in ten can ruin a revolutionary group. To make things worse, there is no unification around a leader or what should come next. If anything, this war demonstrates the tyranny and tentacles of the modern state. The well seems forever poisoned once power is lost to despots. [0]: https://gamaan.org/2025/08/20/analytical-report-on-iranians-... [1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/19/g-s1-114144/iran-voices-war [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/27/i... [3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/iran-built-a-vast-camera-...

> If anything, this war demonstrates the tyranny and tentacles of the modern state. The well seems forever poisoned once power is lost to despots. Didn’t we just see in Syria that’s not the case. It is supremely hard to nation build a large failing state no matter who’s attempting it. Having the guns to challenge the internal security forces seems like a necessary first step.

The hijackers were Saudi nationals, but the operation was in no way sponsored by the Saudi state, which is a staunch US ally. Which is why the US proceeded to (attempt to) flatten Afghanistan instead.

There are gun nut americans who truly believe gun owners would contribute an effective resistance to a modern invading army because they own an ar15. That country is deluded and everyone falls off eventually and trump may have actually accelerated the country out of it's golden age

> There are gun nut americans who truly believe gun owners would contribute an effective resistance to a modern invading army because they own an ar15. It would depend on their patience. The insurgency in Iraq was eventually suppressed (American COIN manuals were updated). The insurgency (?) in Afghanistan outlasted the patience of the invaders. So how long do the 'gun nutters' want to keep at it compared to the opposing force? Further, it's worth asking how effective, on average, is violent disobedience. Generally speaking a movement has about double the odds of success by not using violence: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...

I don’t feel well educated in modern military actions- are you saying that civilian gun owners in America would contribute meaningfully to the national defense (maybe because of things like civil resistance in other modern conflicts?), or am I misunderstanding? Do you have any suggestions for how I could start to broach the topic? It’s so broad and fast-moving that it’s hard to know where to start.

What makes you think the us army would unite against them? Sure a few nut militials would be suppressed, but if gun owners in mass are raising up that means a large controversy that the military will be aware of. The us military is not full of 'yes men' who will follow orders that blindly on home turf, a lot of them will follow. i doubt we will see this in my lifetime

Yes absolutely they would and insurgencies are not the same thing as two nations fighting each other. America has twice as many gun owners as there are people in Afghanistan, a large chunk of them have combat experience.

> Less gullible americans tend to not own guns Guns are not only for counter-insurgency on invasion/warfare. For most people I know who own guns, that's not even on their top 10 list of reasons. But if you don't think they'd be a factor, then you disagree with some of the top generals around the world.

Has anyone “won” a war in the recent past? In the old fashioned sense that they conquered something and used the newly acquired resources to make their own citizens lives better? The problem with the post ww2 world is that the old definition of winning a war no longer holds. You just don’t see wars of conquest very often and they don’t seem to work when they happen. The closest I can think to winning off hand is a few of the colonial civil wars. Vietnam for instance won in the sense that they outlasted the US and have a nominally communist government but it is not an outpost of the Soviet Union and it’s a major trading and tourist partner of the US. Iraq is not led by a belligerent to the US dictator and Afghanistan isn’t home to training camps for terrorists dedicated to attacking the US (yet). These were all extremely stupid, expensive and inhumane military actions. But the US never went into them to hold territory. So “there until we got tired of it” is as close to winning as it was ever going to be.

Then by the stated aims going in the US “won” both wars in Iraq.

> If this happens and Cuba decides to launch drones/missiles against the US homeland, it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon. Yes that would be a typical US solution. Let's liberate the Cuban people! By flattening them.

USA “flattened” and invaded Afghanistan but decades after Taliban is just back again. I don’t know, maybe it’s time for USA to just stop getting involved in wars.

For any country, really; wars cannot be won anymore unless you exterminate its inhabitants completely. At best you can force a regime change, but as Afghanistan showed, that's fragile and tenuous at best if it's not fully backed by the population.

>If this happens and Cuba decides to launch drones/missiles against the US homeland, it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon. I sort of think it maybe is an exaggeration, you're evidently of the opinion that the U.S happens to have enough battle ready troops with the requisite hardware positioned within a few hours of Cuba so that they can invade and flatten in the time it takes to fly from Miami to Havana? I don't know, but a Destroyer would take about 10 hours to get from Florida to Cuba. It seems your definition of invade and flatten is just dropping bombs, but that definitely does not handle the invade part of things, and it remains to be seen as to whether, with drones, being able to fly non-stop is the great technological advantage it once was. Some preliminary evidence from around the world suggests in a drone led conflict it confers the ability to have expensive hardware destroyed and pilots killed non-stop.

Assuming the scenario happened the first bombing runs would be over after 2h and would continue for the next 48h until amphibious assault fast response finishes landing, by which time it’s safe to assume there isn’t much left to defend (though rubble makes a horrible war zone for the attacking side). Cuba simply isn’t Iran. They’re a blockaded island with not much military experience. Iran is a huge mountainous country preparing for war for the last 40 years with first hand experience of getting blown up from above and from the inside by USA allies and surviving just fine.

Yes, and then they will be welcomed with open arms, right?

I don't think they'd be welcomed at all is the point...

Afghanistan took only 18 years. For the 20 years war you are probably talking about: I wouldn't call significant civil unrest in opposition of the war "getting bored"

USA is good at bombing places. It just so happen that it usually looses the wars after that and usually creates a lot more probpems for itself in the long run. Taliban is back in power, having stronger grap on power then before. Meanwhile, everybody knows what happens to those who cooperate with USA - they get abandoned and betrayed.

Of all the shortages the US military has, this is not one of them. They have an almost unlimited capacity to destroy fixed targets.

> it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon But it is, the US is no position to flatten anything. Afghanistan? Lost Vietnam? Lost Ukraine? Lost Iran? will be lost And these are heavily embargoed 3rd world countries. In the first days of the Israeli-US war in Iran (a country under decades of embargo by the way) the US, Israel and vassals lost 60+ planes (plus who knows what else they are not reporting. Trump is not coming out of this, if he makes the grave mistake of sending troops to their demise this administration is done.

> But it is, the US is no position to flatten anything. The US is certainly in a position to flatten (with conventional force) anything in the Carribean, whatever failures it had in long counterinsurgencies where the logistics tail wrapped nearly halfway around the world. (And however badly it would probably fail in occupation in many of the places it could easily flatten close by, for that matter; flattening is much easier than occupying.) > Afghanistan? Lost Vietnam? Lost Ukraine? Lost Iran? Lost Ukraine? Ukraine hasn't lost and the US was never a direct belligerent in that conflict.

The linked tweet says this: > USAF B-52H refueling from a KC-135 tanker on its way to strike Iran. with emphasis on "on its way", so not "over" Iran. So not sure your link proves your original point (which, if I understood right, was that these Americans are flying these bombers over Iran itself). It's also telling that the Americans haven't managed to gain their much desired air supremacy, lots of Dohuet fanboys in the US Military, hopefully this war will bring their Air Power ambitions a notch or two down (even though I have my doubts).

> If the enemy does the same kind of mindless killing to the civilians, then I would have different ideas. You mean like bombing a school and killing about 150 schoolgirls? The USA had a lot of local support and goodwill in Afghanistan, and turned it into support for the Taliban, because they kept killing civilians in their attempts to beat the Taliban with bombs, because they wanted to limit the unpopular ground troop deloyments. The chance that the same will happen in Iran is precisely 100%

German geography makes it much easier to invade (most of the country except for the far south is a relatively flat plain). And it still wasn't much fun for the troops who had to do it in 1944 and 1945 even against a significantly weakened force fighting on multiple fronts at once

The threat of Japanese people all waging guerrilla warfare was considered real enough that the US decided to keep the Japanese Emperor as figurehead (even though the US had enough power to sentence or even execute him for war crimes), just so that the Emperor could order his people to surrender and obey US forces. Something the current US regime might have forgotten.

Yes, hence the continued US occupation after WWII, among other countermeasures. Israel has been killing iranians for quite some time. Here are some notable examples from the last twenty years or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinations_of_Iranian_nucl...

I’m not sure I agree with your argument but all of it made sense until you started talking about Cuba. Iran knows that the US population really really doesn’t want a ground invasion. Right now, we have lost a handful of lives from missiles hitting US bases, but it’s not the same as a ground war. Cuba, however, would very much get a ground invasion if they start striking the US with missiles. It’s not even a question. And I also assume their leaders are not religious fanatics with any interest in martyrdom.

Re: I'd be astonished if 1000s of exit strategies weren't deep planned, maybe a dozen best-outcomes planned, before a single plane bombed anything. The US knows how to exit this. Isn't this just wishfull thinking? I mean, more mature administrations than Trump's have blundered into Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan without real exit strategies... Re: Iranian drones to Russia: Russians now (for quite some time) have their own production and development of Shahed derivatives, I doubt there are shipments from Iran to Russia. Re: policing Hormuz: Europe won't do it, for the same reason US is not doing it (it is an impossible task). Re: the overall aim: deny China the access to the Gulf oil, succeeding so far, but ultimately pointless (China will be lifted by greatly increased demand for its renewables and battery tech, as well as their electric cars)

> The US has some of the most capable spy networks, knowledge, and military experience on the planet. Oh how cute, we are dusting off the cover on the greatest hits! I remember hearing this one back in the early 2000's! Unrelated, how many WMDs did they find in Iraq again? You know what, never mind, i'm sure it was just LOADS obviously! > The US knows how to exit this. Oh yeah, how's that? They gonna spend twenty years and $2.3 trillion dollars there?

This reads as a Tom Clancy wet dream of American Machiavellian geopolitical maneuvering and not (what it is) yet another historic military intervention blunder - the likes of which we've seen multiple times in just our lifetimes alone (Vietnam/Iraq) - lead by some of the dumbest people to ever grace the highest positions of our military apparatus. Not only is China still receiving oil from Iran but Russias oil revenues have spiked significantly because of the conflict with the FT considering Russia the biggest winners of this conflict so far. Hard to really analyze your post because you look at geopolitics through the lens of Jack Bauer

Ufff, just to be clear: Are you saying that invading and conquering Iran won't be much more difficult than doing the same for Afghanistan? I want some of the good stuff you are using!

In chapter 11 of All Quiet on the Western Front Paul and his unit find an abandoned food cache in the middle of no mans land. Instead of secreting away the food back to their lines where they will have to share it, they decide to just cook and eat it right then and there. But a spotter plane from the allies sees the smoke and then begins shelling their position. Cue a terrifying, if hilarious, scene where the soldiers try and cook pancakes as shells explode around them. Paul, as the last to leave, takes his pancakes on a plate and dashes out, timing his escape between bursts, and just barely making it back to the German trenches. Its a rare comic scene in an otherwise horrific and very real look at WW1. The scene in the book is just so familiar to the lines in Ukraine these days, nearly a hundred years later. Instead of spotter planes near the dawn of aviation, we have satellites and drones (similarly quite new in the role). Instead of just shells and fuzing experts, we have FPV drones and much more sophisticated shells. Instead of buddies from the same towns all huddled together in cold muddy holes, we have deracinated units spread far and wide in laying in fear of thermal imaging. This results in a no mans land again, but a dozen kilometers wide instead of a few hundred meters wide, and somehow more psychologically damaging. My point is that absent any tech that will miraculously be invented and deployed widely in the new few weeks, the Iran war, if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today, which is somehow a worse version of trench warfare . Even casual Victoria II players know that WW1 is essentially the final boss of the game. And the 'lesson' of Vicky II is essentialy: Do not fight WW1, it ruins Everything . To be clear: The US is choosing to fight a worse version of WW1 without even a stated (or likely even known) condition of victory. We're about to send many thousands boys to suffer and die for not 'literally nothing', but actually literally nothing.

Ukrainian war is the way it is because neither side has a decisive advantage in air. There's barely any CAS - there are, however, lightweight drones. If Iran were to become a major ground war, one of the sides would have air dominance, and we know which one. How that would change things remains to be seen. But it wouldn't be the same exact trench war, that's certain enough.

> if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today I do not think this is correct. The problem in Ukraine is that anti-air defenses control the skies, so the only accurate long range fires are expensive missiles in short supply. This seems to not be a problem in Iran. US forces can fly relatively cheap bomb trucks anywhere and drop ordinance on anything. Stealth aircraft and NATO doctrine apparently work. I'm not advocating for a ground invasion, but there's no reason to believe it would go the way of Ukraine.

It depends a lot on the kind of campaign that is fought. The US had complete air superiority in Iraq and Afghanistan and while it helped it is unclear how it would play out in a drone-heavy battlefield. In Afghanistan for example the assault on Shah-i-Kot Valley and the ineffectiveness of air support is instructive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Anaconda#TF_Rakkasan It's worth noting that the US lost both those wars - the Taliban rules again in Afghanistan and Iran is more influential in Iraq after the fall of Saddam than it was before, eg: https://www.cfr.org/articles/how-much-influence-does-iran-ha...

> The problem in Ukraine is that anti-air defenses control the skies... <snip> ...US forces can fly relatively cheap bomb trucks anywhere and drop ordinance on anything. Stealth aircraft and NATO doctrine apparently work. In Ukraine, neither side has access to the air weaponry (in capabilities or volume) that the US does - so the battlefield has evolved into one of drone superiority. So yes, the US could (logistics willing) pummel Iran with B52s, B2s, and the like, maybe largely unopposed. However, this would only achieve so much: "winning" would be very different, especially when it's likely to turn into into a grinding resistance/insurgency ground war. A better analogy than Ukraine may be the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, only Iran has far more trained fighters and weaponry from the start. Or Vietnam, of course. Maybe the US could "win", but it would depend on the strength of the political will to continue losing soldiers and spending huge amounts of money; and it would certainty be seen as a "forever war". And of course (as noted elsewhere) the US' more recent forays into Iraq and Afghanistan show how difficult regime change by force is.

Iran is a large country, just getting to Tehran with large-enough force is logistically enormous task. Complicated by the fact that the logistic convoys can nowadays be trivially decimated by FPVs. Air superiority is not going to help you much against small dispersed resistance groups with FPVs (ideally fiber optics, so not detectable by emissions from afar). There is a chance that there will be similar democratization with AA (you will need proper AA missiles, the physics of reaching a fast jet flying high simply demands it), but the distributed passive targeting is made much simpler with current commodity computing and optics. Achieving AA Denial is difficult, but forcing the attacker to use standoff munitions instead of gravity bombs/close-in air support not so much: shifting the risk of losing an aircraft from 1 in 100000 to 1 in 100 will do it.

and nor does it result in victory without the follow up of a ground assault. I'm legit baffled by the US engaging in a war that suffers exactly the same negative properties as the Saudi's war in Yemen. You don't even have to learn from history, the Saudi/Yemeni conflict is still active today. Air campaigns alone are entirely insufficient, especially if your enemy has mountains.

> Trump is choosing to get it over with the easy way for America at least if they won't negotiate That is… not the easy way. That’s how you get a nightmare for decades to come, endless waves of refugees and a limitless supply of terrorists. Though, to be fair, there is no easy way of doing what Trump claims he wants to do. Which is why it’s spectacularly stupid to do it in the first place. I mean, they did not expect retaliation in the strait of Hormuz . Amateur hour does not even begin to describe it. Spectacularly stupid is probably way too kind. If you must learn from the Khans, you’ll find that decapitation is not enough. You need people to put in place of the former leadership, and enforcers so that the underlying power structure stays in place to serve the new masters. The reason why is that, as the US learnt in Iraq and Afghanistan, it takes a bloody lot of soldiers to keep a whole population in check. Trump does not want to do the former and does not have the latter.

This is delusional. Iran has thousands of ASM on the coastline. They need 1 to make it through to take out a tanker. Even the best anti missile systems we have aren’t 99.99% reliable. It was always a losing proposition. Iran has always been able to close the strait. What I don’t get is why we need to take Kharg island. Can’t we just blockade ships selling Iranian oil?

I think the collective take might be too focused on the kinetic picture to see the underlying issue(s). 1) we want Iranian oil flowing and being bought elsewhere for the economy and to avoid hard decisions in Beijing, and as we’ve recently heard ad nausea money is fungible so… if one hasn’t thought to invade, dominate and occupy mountainous terrain filled with holy people, then ‘open’ means money to The Baddies. 2) it’ll only take a few wrecks to create navigation hazards, tankers are huge and that strait is shallow and narrow. The cleanup crews are slower, they also need massive ships. 3) let’s take a 0.01% reliability of missile attacks… drones, rpgs, suicide attacks, artillery, kamikaze plane attacks, mines, and trebuchets are also out there. So, again, unless we’re invading… fuhgeddabout 100% And, fatally: 4) it’s not the missiles, it’s the threat, and who is insuring the massive money-boats. If your insurance company thought your car would, 0.01% of the time, be blown up resulting in a total wreck and complete loss of cargo and future revenue, your policy would not be what it is. You insure your oil boat for trips, and if not you don’t move it. Trump doesn’t decide this, BigBoat Insurance brokers decide this, with their wallets and vibes. 0.01% x An Oil Tanker (slow, giant, vulnerable, + oil leak cleanup and ecosystem damage, loss of life) x totally foreseeable circumstances = a ‘closed’ straight on demand. Unless, again, the plan is invado-conquering.

I'm not sure that the USN would have been any more effective 30 years ago if it tried to make a narrow waterway that is off-shore from a medium-strength world power accessible for safe commercial ship traffic. Effective anti-ship missiles have been around for a long time. Given how understandably sensitive commercial ship crews and owners are to even slight danger, there's just no way to reduce the risk to the necessary near-zero without a prolonged air campaign and/or land invasion to support the naval effort.

> destroying much of Iran's military and leadership Good at hitting targets, terrible at achieving goals. Same as Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. Were the Taliban destroyed by killing their upper echelons several times over? In terms of resilience, the Iranians are similar, arguably much more so.

> Were the Taliban destroyed by killing their upper echelons several times over? Of course not, because that wasn't the goal and would be impossible, because we were recreating the conditions that led to the Taliban taking control in the first place (corrupt and amoral warlords oppressing the populace). Afghanistan's strategic location and suitability for poppy farming and generating dark money flows is why we went in. It was the staging ground for the plans to overthrow "Iraq [...] Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan" ( https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/9/22/us-plans-to-attack-... ). We're still involved in active conflicts in most of those countries.

The issues the US faces are political and humanitarian (and economic) rather than military. I don't see any compelling evidence that the US couldn't open the straits if it really wanted to, it's just that the cost in lives and hardware would be unlike anything the US has seen since Vietnam, maybe even the second world war. And of course, once you open the strait, you have to keep it open. The whole thing is a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. It should probably also be pointed out that doing nothing has a cost too, and it's probable that the bill for doing nothing over a long period of time has come due. I, like most people, never bought the WMD claims leading up to Iraq. I'm not sure what to think here. I certainly don't buy that Iran wasn't working towards getting the bomb after how well it worked out for North Korea. I can't claim to know the calculus involved in determining whether or not it's worth going to war with Iran to stop them from getting the bomb.

Given you compare the cost of a US operation to open the straits to the Vietnam War, it seems prudent to mention that the outcome of the Vietnam war, according to Wikipedia, was a North Vietnam victory.

Yeah I don’t find this article particularly insightful. If we don’t have troops on the ground to prevent attacks in the straight, it would be always be vulnerable despite superiority. Shit if we don’t control the land, they could drop a bunch jet skis with bombs in the water in the middle of the night. The straight is only 21 miles wide at some points

The big lesson from the US/Israel war against Iran is that the power balance has shifted away from strike capability toward defense magazine depth. You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes. But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.

> You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes To be clear, there is zero historic evidence—going back to the Blitz—that strategic bombing has ever been able to do any of these things. Except the one about choke points. That isn’t strategic. It’s tactical. And using artillery or airpower for shaping operations absolutely works. > you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less Agree. Fortunately, the MIC seems to have recognized this. None of it fundamentally changes the value of carriers. It just means they need to be defended differently from before. Sort of how you can’t sent lone carriers out into the ocean, they have to be escorted.

I agree with all of this except the notion that this is a recent change. Infantry being needed to seize and hold territory has been standard military doctrine around the world throughout history. Air power can tip the balance between opposing armies but has never been enough to settle a war alone. I'm confident that every person working in the Pentagon is aware of all this, aside from the SecDef. I'm also not aware of a single case in history where a massive bombing campaign from a hostile country resulted in an immediate populist uprising and a regime change that favored that aggressor country. Having your city bombed for weeks on end tends to cause people to shelter where they can, worry solely about how they will survive the wreckage, and bond with their fellow citizens. The fact that an air campaign and magical thinking was the complete game plan from trump and hegseth shows how utterly unqualified they are for the positions they have.

> Keeping the strait of Hormuz open would be one of those functions, wouldn't it? Oh, wait... Gottem! Not really though. I don't think anyone would claim a carrier group should be able to hold an adversary's coastal waters. Empty them from beyond visual range? Yes. Camp out in them? No. That said, if and when Mango decides to land troops in Iran, the fleet will be an irreplaceable piece of that operation. That is global force projection. > Seriously, your question is borderline trolling, you know exactly which functions of a carrier group are and are not matched by drones flown from containers. I mean but it helps in coming to an understanding if you articulate them. Acknowledging them will suffice! > The point is, in case it wasn't clear, that you can do a ton of destruction without necessarily opening yourself up to a counter attack Agreed! > So if you have to hide your carrier group at stand-off distance for fear of seeing it sunk then it is not all that different from that container full of drones. You can destroy stuff, and that's about it. Disagree!

If I you can project power globally , but as soon as a human is put on the ground they're disintegrated by a 100 dollar drone, how important was your ability to get there?

I'm just going to throw some napkin pointers and rough guesstimate-arithmetics here. -At the very minimum you would have to search and secure 130 000 square kilometers in a mountainous region, in a hostile country where you have no popular support, and where most of the male population has had somewhere around two years of military training. To be sure that Iranians couldn't lob anti-ship missiles into the strait, you'd probably need to double or triple that area. -And that's because of anti-ship missiles, with distances ranging from few hundred kilometers to thousand or more. And only one missile needs to get through to cause a mass casualty event onboard of a warship involving hundreds of people. So, assuming that troops get to the shore, then there's the slight peculiarity of modern warfighting. Drones. Cheap and plentiful, with FPV drones having the range varying from 30 to 60+km, you can be assured that visitors stay on shore or island(s) will be filled with plenty of activities such as listening to never ending buzzing of drones or trying to find cover from those drones. As good as US electronic warfare efforts might be, wire-guided FPV drones don't really care. So unless the US incursion is going to be anything but a short 30 minute visit to a largely meaningless Tump island we're probably going to be looking at hundreds of casualties if we are extremely lucky. If they really want to open and "secure" the Strait, I think we're going to be looking at Russo-Ukrainian war-tier butcher's bill. And since that would be perfectly fine for Israel, I think that's exactly what we'll be getting. I hope I'm wrong though.

Trump asks the Oracle at Delphi what will occur if he invades Iran. "This war will surely bring about regime change," says the Oracle. "Good," thinks Trump as he heads into the defense meeting.

US doesn't actually have a way to end the Ukraine war. It doesn't have a way to end the Iran war either. Other than unconditional surrender.

Reality of course is the other way around: the US defense industry gets to build gold toilets (for the White House ballroom built on the ruins of the East Wing), while the Ukranians absolutely must build stuff that works and is cheap or they get a missile on their heads. The US survived spending a trillion dollars to achieve very little in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure they'll survive spending another trillion over a decade to achieve nothing in Iran other than hundreds of thousands dead.

These are orthogonal problems. Getting into this war was stupid. Being unable to win it is also pretty bad.

These are the same problem. Getting into this war was stupid because it's virtually impossible to win it.

Brute forcing things is the kind of thinking that leads to the moron losing the game of chess. And is basically the approach the U.S. took in Vietnam.

Well, regardless of technology, the space of things you can accomplish without risking your own troops' lives is very small. (Unless you're willing to go nuclear, which has the pesky downside of ending the world.) To put it in perspective - in Vietnam, opposition forces lost over a million troops and continued to fight viciously. The US lost around 50,000 and gave up and left. Democratic countries simply lack the stomach for this kind of thing (which is a good thing, really).

I think being the "home team" makes swallowing those casualties easier (as easy as they can be, anyways); it's easy to perceive the situation as a fight for your life. Obviously, there were other things going on in Vietnam (and Afghanistan and the larger War on Terror) to keep them fighting but it's much easier to muster up the manpower when a war seems existential because it's happening in your neighborhood.

Sure, they will find out it is a good military. No doubt about that. What the US has found out repeatedly but fails to acknowledge is that the opposition proves to be a match. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia have shown just how deep reserves of human resilience and arsenal of guerrilla tactics they have. This doesn't fit the US's mindset about how war is to be waged. Meanwhile, the American public wants a quick skirmish and a bold "We WON" claim .. it has no appetite for body bags coming home and the price of oil rising. Which is why if China makes a move on Taiwan, the US can do nothing.

The US military is extremely good at doing specific objectives. All militaries are garbage at changing hearts and minds. That's what diplomacy is for.

> Pretty sure anyone who fights the US military finds out pretty fast it’s a good military. I am not sure about that. Iraq, Afghanistan, to name the new ones and Vietnam to name an old one. Sure you can take an easy/undisciplined target like Maduro. But many armies in the world can also do that. Another thing that has to be recognized: alternative warfare (ie: terrorism) is a legitimate form of warfare regardless of its morality. You can't, in my opinion, claim military supremacy while not being able to contain these other risks. Another upcoming one: cyber-warfare.

It's not the first time that overwhelming force fails to deliver results for the US when they get bogged down in an asymmetric war. The Korean and Vietnam wars last century still involved air carriers parked off the coast of Korea and Vietnam. But in the end, those wars turned into messy grinds. And even with extensive navy and air support resulted in eventual withdrawal/cease fires on unfavorable terms. Vietnam especially was painful. Asymmetric war fare against a determined enemy is just hard and it always has been. Cheap drones and missiles are part of wars like that now. You can stash them all over the place and dig in. The Russians learned that the hard way in Afghanistan. As did the British before them. And more recently the US of course. The withdrawal from Afghanistan rivaled that of the one in Vietnam. Complete with chaotic scenes of people desperately trying to get out. That's only a few years ago. In the Gulf, the Houthis still pose a threat after years of determined efforts to take them out. In the same way, it took the Israeli's very long to neutralize Hamas in Gaza. And that's a few tens of miles away from their capital. Same with Hezbollah on their northern border. In Iraq, IEDs kept grinding away at the US forces long after victory was declared. And that was with massive amounts of boots on the ground and the country fully defeated and occupied. Iran of course has been supplying weaponry for proxy wars like this for decades. Iran is much bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan and much better prepared for a land/guerilla war on their own territory. The country was built on asymmetric warfare like this and has had decades to prepare and dig in and lots of experience via the various proxy wars I mentioned. The unfortunate reality is that that straight is only going to open when Iran decides that is in their interest.

The issue though is that this won't get us maritime supremacy. To get civilian tankers through the strait you need that. Iran will still take the occasional shot at these ships and who in their right mind would put their ship into a situation where there is even a 1 in 2000 chance you will be struck? At the end we will have boots on the ground, with real casualties, potentially a ship or two actually damaged and Iran unleashed and attacking everyone's critical oil infrastructure and water infrastructure. They will even probably find a way to hit a ship or two in the red sea just to spread the panic. My original point was that we could 'just blow things up' and get in there, not that we would succeed in achieving a great military objective.

Yes, i think the Trump admin has escalated itself into a situation that either involves ground troops or leaving without opening the strait. The first is bad due to the losses that will be incurred and the difficulty of holding territory.. for unclear strategic reasons (I thought we destroyed their nuclear program last summer / what was the urgency / is this even our war?). The second is bad because the strait was open before this started, so things are worse than starting conditions. That is not to say Iran is winning. Remember this is not a sports game, and no one needs to win. It is possible, and likely, for everyone to lose (be in a worse position than prior).

Correct - we can send in ground troops and fail to open the strait

In fact, that's the most likely outcome.

> at an unknown cost We know the cost. We've conducted that type of warfare before. It's incredibly destructive and barbaric and requires huge amounts of human sacrifice to positively take control of territory after you've finished battering it with high explosives from every available angle. It looks really bad on TV. > cruise missile carriers You don't get very large payloads this way. It's fine if you want to pierce the armor of another ship or if you want to launch an "assassination missile" at a single unit but not awesome if you want to replace the capabilities of carriers and battleships and the literal BFGs they carry. > If you build ships good for real wars you tend to get into wars. It was meant to be a deterrent against other nation states and one particular form of naval warfare. In the modern world of terrorist cells and asymmetric warfare this may be a moot point.

We’ve tried the “just air power” approach a number of times. It never works by itself.

Your analysis of the war seems to hinge on a lack of "gumption", which is coincidentally the exact same thing I've heard conservative old boomers say about Vietnam. So I would say you're about equal in terms of adding to the discussion. It is, unfortunately, divorced from reality. The critical thing about hidden missiles that you seem to be missing is: you can't bomb them if you don't know where they are. We've already seen a 4 week bombing campaign that has included everything from a children's school to a chemotherapy company to bunkers under Tehran, so I don't think there's a lack of "bloodlust" or "gumption" from any of the so-called leaders at the DoD. Rather, it seems that they simply - don't know where the missiles and drones are. Which as I pointed out earlier, makes it rather hard to bomb them.

Are we really still pushing bomber mafia nonsense 80 years later?

In the movie Thirteen Days, JFK mentions a book titled March of Folly by Barbara Tuchmann. I bought the book on that tip and it has an interesting chapter on Vietnam. I don't think adding a chapter on this "special operation" would even be worth it as it would just be repetitive.

Not every war can be fought from air, there needs to be soldiers on the ground. In fight against ISIS, the Iraqi amry, Shia Militias, Kurds and others were ground forces while Allies were in Air. In Afghanistan & Gulf War, US forces were on ground. But in these "conflict", no party is ready to send ground forces, ground forces to stop the air drones, ship drones etc. So the "blockade" will probably continue.

There is no party even capable of doing it. The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country, at the same time as there would be 'all out war' with Iran, which would be backed by China and to a lesser extent Russia, and whereupon an invasion would provide them with millions of determined fighters. We're talking 'Gulf War' scale of operation against a much bigger, more capable country, and of forces willing to fight. And the US doesn't even have anywhere to do it from . Assuming a Gulf country would host an invasion force - extremely unlikely - there's no magical way for US to cross the Gulf with large numbers of forces, as we can't get capitol ships in there in the first place. There's no amphibious capability at the scale necessary on the Arabian Sea. Literally just the logistics of large scale landings is almost impossible. That leaves the Kuwait / Iran border, and maybe something a bit wider. And then fight through the mountains across the Gulf? The thought is absurd, it's a 'major campaign theatre' - of which US forces were theoretically capable of fighting in two at once, but that's not pragmatic. That's 'wartime economy' kind of thing. It's possible but unlikely that 10K marines and paratroopers are going to be able to do much, because it's very risky and likely won't accomplish much.

> The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles, or an area bigger than more than half the countries on earth, including North and South Korea, Iran is the 18th largest country in the world

At some point, there's going to be a dumbenough general to try to paratrooper their way in. They've spent the past year trying to cull "dysloyal" troops, so at some point, the delusion will surface is an absurdly dumb attempt. Hard to see it any other way.

US forces are not partisan and not culled, they're mostly the same entity they were last year, but with a few Generals asked to retire. (Edit: highly professional I might add. There are quirks, and obvious hints of 'nationalist bias' - but that's to be expected. They are not the 'cultural problem' we see on the news - at least not for now. They lean 'normal') The current Joint Chiefs is a bit obsequious but he's not crazy. These are very sane people, for the most part. They may be pressed to do something risky, like land troops at Kharg island, but not completely suicidal. That 'risk' may entail getting a number of soldiers captured, but that's not on the extreme side of military failure, it's mostly geopolitical failure. It would certainly end DJT as a popular movement. Having a ship hit, or a few soldiers captured - and this sounds morose - is normal. That's why they exist. It's the political fallout that's deadly. They won't do anything to crazy. The craziest thing they could do is 'full invasion' and Congress won't allow that. It's very unpopular and DJT has populist instinct as well - he's trying to 'find a way out'.

There was an article somewhere a few days ago, where the author raised the question: Why buy tanks in a world of drone warfare. Something like that. I see this as much the same "problem". Drones can't really take or hold territory, they can only deny access to it. At some point you need people and armoured vehicles on the ground. The US is facing the same issue in Iran. You can bomb all you like, but a bomber, like a drone, can't hold land. Iran can launch drones and missiles towards the Strait of Hormuz from the entire country, denying anyone access, but also without being able to hold it. Because they went in without a plan, or even a goal really, the US administration denied itself, and everyone else, access to the strait. The military leadership probably knew this. If not they could have asked Ukraine if this was a sound idea, given their knowledge and experience with Iranian drone technology.

The US no longer uses its army for defense. Nobody in their immediate region dares attack them, they're too powerful ("Godzilla", in the words of John Mearsheimer). All the wars that the US has fought since WWII are nothing to do with defense. Just look at the Wikipedia article on "power projection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection The leader image is ... a US aircraft carrier (the USS Nimitz). That's what the US uses its military power for, to influence events in lands far, far away from its territory. But, now, tell me which one of the many wars that the US has fought in after WWII did not end in disaster. Afghanistan? Iraq? Korea? There was a meme doing the rounds the other day: "Name a character who can defeat Captain America". The answer being "Captain Vietnam". The US has faced humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat while bringing death and destruction and immeasurable misery to millions around the world. That is what HN users seem to have an "anti" sentiment for. If you watch the news you'll be able to tell that this goes far beyond HN. The whole of US society seems to be extremely tired with those "forever wars", those senseless excursions to faraway lands, that not only do not secure US interests but turn world opinion more and more against the US. Even the US' closest allies now fear the US: vide Greenland. Anyone with more than a video game or comic book understanding of how the real world works would do well to be concerned. Edit: also from EU, btw. Greek but living in the UK.

The U.S. can't win this war. John Kiriakou did a nice analysis on this on his recent podcasts. "Iran just has to prolong the war and survive it to win". Trump on the other hand needs a decisive win fast, or the economic and political fallout will be too big. As long as Iran can launch cheap drones and keep a small but steady pressure there is just no path out of this for the U.S. except to go home.

While it can very well be true, I wonder if we don't exagerate the will of the iranian regime and its ablity in the current time to think this far ahead. I see them more in survival mode, I'm not sure they fight for future deterence, maybe the goals align currently but seems to me to be happenstance. They seem resilient but I wonder how much they would be close of falling. Of course, I wouldn't have done this war, and I certainly would stop it now.

> That’s the thing there is no stopping it now. Trump walks away and ... Right, Short of unconditional surrender, it is very hard for one party in a war to just end it without the other side also agreeing to cease. Otherwise, walking away just lets them target your back.

I maintain hope that the US will declare some arbitrary victory condition "Iran's capacity to do XYZ has been critically degraded!" and will unilaterally disengage. Unfortunately this will almost definitely occur after Israel has included it's invasion of Lebanon and annexed more territory, which is what this whole war seems to be a cover for.

Stupidly, yes, with carpet bombing. Practically, no, that would be horrible. More horrible, possibly, than taking out the power and water infrastructure.

> Could that work? It didn’t end well in Vietnam We can't carpet bomb to regime change. But we can probably depopulate critical areas around the coasts while ships transit. It's stupidly expensive, both in materiel and collateral cost. But it's feasible. Whether we have the bomb-production is a separate question to which I don't have the answer.

Depopulation won't stop the IRGC from digging up a Shahed buried in the sand and launching it. The range is so great you would have to pacify the entire east of Iran, an absolutely impossible task.

Carpet bombing didn't even break Vietnam. It didn't break WWII Germany either.

> and Ukraine haven’t surrendered Different goals. Carpet bombing to deny Iran access to its coast is maneouvre warfare. It’s tactical. Carpet bombing to force Kyiv to capitulate is strategic bombing. It has never worked.

You can't deny access to a coast that large with carpet bombing, especially in a mountainous terrain. It has never worked. You'd need tens to hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground to do that. If you wanted to try it with bombs, it would take continual re-dropping of hundreds of thousands of bombs every few hours to cover (1600km * 8km) to keep people out, even assuming they have 0 shelter or cover.

tumpy was/is/might be going to china in a week or so, and there is pretty much no way that can happen while WWIII is launching, and/or things are going mega bad for the marines, as there is no way they are not going find themselves in a real fight. all those islands are owned and operated by the irainian military, who in fact have complete long range artilery superiority,and every square inch dialed in, dont see how it could be done except with a full and total invasion of the wholecountry, which would likely go worse and would require a much much larger force than the one on hand, but tumpy is crazy, so who knows